For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       I remember once hearing a fridge defined as: "a place where you store your food, before throwing it away". A recent report shows this definition to be savagely true. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has produced research suggesting that people in England and Wales needlessly throw away 3.6 million tonnes of food each year. No one I know has enough money; desperate times and all that. But apparently everyone's got enough food to throw away about a fifth of their stockpile – untouched. One radio mum explains the problem: "The trouble is, you go into the supermarket to buy some milk, but the milk is always put at the far end, so you get all this other stuff in your face first – and the cakes look so good, you have to pop one or two in the basket." This is true. How often I heard the following, when I worked in a supermarket. As I packed the customer's 5th bag they would say: "And I only came in for some milk!" My record was serving a customer who "only came in for some milk" – and spent £73. We're clearly buying too much, as the statistics show. How about this one? Every household in England and Wales throws away about 18 per cent of their food; and those with children, 27 per cent. And what are we throwing away in particular? Well, 5500 whole chickens get the old heave-ho every day, followed closely by 440,000 ready meals – again, daily. Yes, I can hardly believe it either. Bread and potatoes were the two foods most commonly thrown when they could very well be eaten. And spare a thought for the tragic yoghurt. The yoghurt is the single most abandoned item in these parts, with 1.3 million unopened cartons going the way of the bin every twenty four hours. So that's over two million pointlessly killed chickens a year, and over 60 million yoghurts joining everything else on our ballooning land fill sites. And that's without the Scot and Irish leftovers. The Environment minister said the findings were "Staggering". Adding: "There are climate costs to all of us growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food we throw away." We need the prophets of old to induce some much needed shelf-reflection. Let Jeremiah weep for the prematurely-exiled ready meals! Let Hosea long for the restoration of the perfectly edible potatoes! Amos shall denounce the basket of summer fruit thrown casually away, and Malachi proclaim the Great Day of the yoghurt! Let Ezekiel envision the New Supermarket where milk is not always put at the far end. And by the landfill site, choking with methane gas, let us hear again the writer of Lamentations: "Is it nothing to you, you who pass by?" Until the new food dawn, even our most famous of prayers may need an extra line: "Give us today our daily bread – that we might throw most of it away." More writings © Simon Parke